3-D Printers Could Help Build Tomorrow’s Massive Data Centers

Nike is using 3-D printers to produce football cleats. Doctors are using them to print prosthetics for their patients. And the likes of Ford and GM are prototyping brake rotors, shift knobs, and other car parts with the help of these modern printers, a new kind of industrial robot that can produce almost any physical object — at least in theory.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the tech world has now applied 3-D printing to data centers, those massive computing warehouses that underpin the internet and the software services that drive our largest corporations. At its manufacturing plant in Chandler, Arizona, an outfit called IO is using a 3-D printer to prototype “data center modules,” enormously complex containers of computing equipment that can be pieced together — almost like giant Legos — to form much larger data center facilities. Much like GM and Ford, the company can shape and test and reshape prototypes with relative ease. “It allows us to have a much more agile — and fast — process,” says Andreas Zoll, IO’s vice president of engineering.

The idea of a modular data center took root at Google about a decade ago. Rather than fashioning each of its data centers from scratch, the search giant started constructing these facilities using what you might call data-center building blocks. These were basically shipping containers pre-packed with all the necessary computing, electrical, and cooling equipment, all tuned to operate in concert. Via train and boat and truck, Google could readily move these containers to locations around world and then piece them together underneath a common roof. It was a way of both streamlining the construction of these facilities and improving their efficiency once they were up and running.

In the years since, others have taken a similar approach to data center design. Microsoft has adopted data center modules in the facilities driving its web services, and various hardware vendors now sell modules that any business can use in building its own data centers. These vendors include tech giants such as Dell and HP as well as IO, whose equipment is now used by the big-name New York financial house Goldman Sachs.

Rather than fashioning each of its data centers from scratch, Google started constructing these facilities using what you might call data-center building blocks.

In the past, as the company designed its modules, IO had no choice but to call on outside parts makers and manufacturers when it wanted to handle a physical prototype. To prototype even the tiny bracket for a light fixture at the top of the module, the company might spend hundreds of dollars and wait two or three weeks for the prototype to arrive. But in recent months, it has started using a Makerbot 3-D printer to speed the process. Now, says vice president of engineering Zoll, it can prototype that light bracket in a couple of hours — “basically, over lunch time” — and this costs the company about 75 cents (not including the price of the printer, which is probably several thousand dollars).

“The beauty of the technology is that it takes the design of potentially complex objects — and the creation of these objects — and moves this away from specialized organizations, putting it into the hands of companies like ours, and individual people as well,” Zoll says.

The company can also 3-D print the basic design of the module itself, producing a physical model of the frame from digital blueprints mapped out by CAD, or computer added design, software. In short, the printer head creates these models by layering tiny slivers of melted plastic on top of each other. “Instead of just doing design reviews on a big computer display using CAD software,” Zoll says, “we can actually print module frames and piece-parts within this frame to see how we can improve the assembly process. Where do we have potential interface? Where would human access be hard? It’s almost like a chess game. We can move things around, in and out, trying to create efficiency during the design process, right at the front-end.”

These aren’t full-size prototypes. IO’s data center modules are room-sized contraptions, and prototyping them in full would require an enormous printer. But Zoll and crew can produce smaller models that mirror their basic design — models about the size of two or three iPhones.

In the future, 3-D printing could be used to build not just prototypes but actual data center equipment, including computer motherboards and other circuitry, but this won’t happen for years — if it happens at all. “You can print things on a small scale to play with them. Architects do this all the time,” says Berok Khoshnevis, a professor of industrial and systems engineering at the University of Southern California who specializes in 3-D printing. “But building a complete container would be a stupid thing to do. 3-D can’t give you the kind of quality that competing technologies give you.” Indeed, IO is only beginning to explore the possibilities of 3-D printing as a prototyping tool.

IO believes it’s the first company to prototype commercial data center equipment in this way, but it seems the practice has popped up elsewhere. Frank Frankovsky helps oversee hardware projects at Facebook, the company at the heart of a movement to improve the efficiency of data centers across the globe, and he tells us that others are also prototyping data center equipment with 3-D printers. It’s unclear whether this is happening at Facebook, but if it isn’t, it will be. The company is known for exploring the future data center design, and 3-D printing is surely part of that future.